WHAT'S BLOCKING SUPERCONDUCTIVITY?

The superconductivity breakthrough [AtE May 87] was the dis-covery of materials that would support the well-known phenome-non of zero electrical resistance at much higher temperatures than before, enabling superconductors to be cooled by liquid nitrogen rather than by the far more expensive liquid helium.

In the past year not inconsiderable progress has been made, but not enough to overcome the obstacles to commercialization that I mentioned at the time. The reason why I am returning to the sub-ject is the publication of an OTA Report Commercializing High-Temperature Superconductivity, June 1988, ($8, GPO, Wash., DC 20402, stock no. 052-003-01112-3), which I do not recommend wasting money on. Except for a brief appendix, it contains no tech-nical data and is entirely devoted to "strategies" of lavishing money on various organizations so as to prevent the Great Catastrophe: the Japanese getting there first. (They deserve to, because they have saddled themselves with a less obese and less wasteful govern-ment bureaucracy.)

The genuine obstacles to commercialization are, I believe, of three types:

Irrelevance. Unique physical research experiments will simply pay the higher price for liquid helium. The efficiency of large in-dustrial generators is already in the high 90s and the cost of super-conductivity is not justified for a tiny step bringing it a little closer to 100%. Utilities are unlikely to pay the enormous cost of putting transmission lines underground and into liquid nitrogen when transmission losses rarely exceed 15% of the cost of electricity.

Mechanical obstacles. Copper is not just cheap and conduc-tive, but also malleable, ductile and strong. The new superconduc-tive materials are essentially ceramics, which have none of these mechanical properties. Work on superconducting thin filaments twisted into thin bundles and placed into the channels of a flexible copper carrier or matrix seems promising, but is in its infancy.